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!! [MP3]? [QuickTime]? [DivX]? You've come to the right place.

MediaPlayer~s are applications that allow you to view various 'media'. Linux used to be slated for its lack of ability to play MultiMedia (music, video, etc). Today there is almost nothing that you can't play on Linux, and it's not very tricky at all. In fact you may find it to be much less of a hassle than the constant CoDec-hunting needed in MicrosoftWindows.

Quick summary of players avalible for Linux:
* [MPlayer]
* mpg123(1)
* [mpg321 | http://freshmeat.net/projects/mpg321]
* ogg123(1)
* RealPlayer
* [Totem]
* VideoLanClient
* [Xine]
* [XMMS]

Many [LinuxDistribution]s will not play [MP3] or [DVD] by default due to patent issues. For [Debian] or [Ubuntu] see AptSourcesList for more details.

!! Audio Players

[Beep Media Player | http://beep-media-player.org/]:
    A [Fork] of [XMMS] updated for [GTK2] and renamed at the bequest of the company that maintains [XMMS].
RhythmBox:
    An iTunes-inspired interface for [GNOME], built on [GStreamer].
[StreamTuner | http://www.nongnu.org/streamtuner/]:
    Mainly concentrates on internet radio, but the Local-plugin allows browsing [MP3]s by directories on disc.
A range of curses-based players:
    A curses interface is actually quite well suited to an audio player, although the various projects have found no consensus on appropriate keystrokes.  [Cplay|http://mask.tf.hut.fi/~flu/hacks/cplay/], [moc|http://moc.daper.net/], [juke], [pytone|http://www.luga.de/pytone/], [mp3blaster|http://mp3blaster.sourceforge.net/], [ncmpc|http://hem.bredband.net/kaw/ncmpc/], [playmp3list], [mplay|http://mplay.sourceforge.net/] are some examples.  Cplay and moc, at least, are quite easy to understand and far less prone to freezing and crashing than RhythmBox.

!! Video Players

[Totem]:
     A [GNOME] video player using either [Xine] or [GStreamer] (see below).
[MPlayer]:
     One of the original [X11] video players, which uses its own media libraries.  A lot of OpenSource CoDec~s start life as part of [MPlayer].

!! Backends

If you're a programmer, and you want to build media into your application, you could look at something like

[Xine]:
    Originally an open source media player application, xine split into into a player and a backend (xine-lib), which is the basis for many other media front ends (such as [Totem].)
[GStreamer]:
    The [GNOME] media framework (in the same way that DirectX is the Windows media framework.)
[ffmpeg]:
    All of these media players use ffmpeg's libavcodec for encoding/ decoding.
[MPlayer]:
    The source may not be as neatly separable as Xine, but it is still quite easy to build a new almost functional front-end, as many projects have demonstrated.

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CategoryBeginners
10 pages link to MediaPlayer:
Last edited on Friday, September 29, 2006 3:15:45 pm by DouglasBagnall
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